Webb

What keeps you writing still? What’s the motivation to write?

I think I can still do it better. I never take it for granted that I’ve mastered songwriting. I don’t think one ever does. Usually what I do is end up hearing a song that I’ve written before on the radio and thinking I wish I could write that line again. Unfortunately, you can’t do that. Once you’ve recorded a song, it has a tendency to stay that way! I can almost always think of ways to improve songs, even songs that were big hits. I’m always working on them. I never stop working on them, which sometimes people find out when they come to my live shows. Sometimes people are very irritated by that. They come to the dressing room and say, “Why did you change ...?” People like to hear things the way they heard them the first time. You learn that you can’t really do that. You just sort of have to leave them alone, leave the mistakes in place.
What keeps me writing is the notion that I can still do a better one, that I could do a Broadway show, that I got the chops for that, that I would like to, for my own satisfaction, demonstrate that I can do that, that life goes on after 30 and 40 and 50 and that it’s okay. You can keep working and continue to contribute to the community and be creative. You can still exercise those talents that God gave you in your golden youth and maybe you can even do it a little bit better than you did then. It seems harder to get people’s attention as you get older but I think that most people do continue to mature and improve in their craft, even airplane pilots. There are guys in their 60s and 70s flying better than they’ve ever flown in their lives. I do it because I can and because I’m still pretty good at it and even now I think I can be better at it.



Jimmy Webb